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Hank saw us coming and said, “We’re having technical—”
“We’re not going to the outpost. We’re going to Nowhere. I’massumingthat’s fine?” Kaden asked.
“Craziest thing, but that doesn’t seem to be having any issues.” Hank shrugged as if he couldn’t understand it himself.
Kaden opened the door to his place and then walked me to the couch and pushed me onto the seat. It didn’t take much effort to get me to sit, as a gentle breeze would’ve knocked me over. I could barely think straight, let alone put up a fight.
He walked back over with a glass of water, a double shot of whiskey, and a box of first-aid supplies.
I went straight for the hard stuff.
“You need to tell me what happened,” he said, while the warmth was spreading down my throat. He was wetting gauze with a flask filled with a concoction of black, gooey stuff that smelled a bit like licorice.
“What is that?”
“It’s for the cuts. Now tell me exactly what happened. Leave nothing out, not even the most minute detail.”
He was leaning close enough that I could smell his scent over the gooey stuff as he dabbed at the tiniest scratches. I was barely nicked, so there had to be something else he feared.
Instead of asking, I drank more whiskey and tried to relay every detail of what happened. There wasn’t much to say, other than mundane details of walking through a DMV.
I took another sip of whiskey. “I was trying to find the target, but it was so quick I couldn’t do anything but duck and hope I lived.”
He pushed his jacket off my shoulders and dabbed at a scrape on my neck. “And what happened then?”
“By the time I felt it, it was already almost there. I didn’t know what to do, so I simply tucked into a ball.” The last thing I’d seen were their terrified faces as I yelled for them to run. That young girl was standing there, healthy, her whole life in front of her, was now buried in rubble.
I took another sip, closing my eyes, trying to force her face from my mind. “I could hear the destruction, the screaming, and I kept my head buried in my hands, praying it would pass.”
My hands shook so badly that he took the glass from me and put it on the table. “Billie, you can’t tell anyone what happened today. If anyone asks if you did that job, you say no, that I called you off at the last minute—right before you were about to go in, I got a hold of you. We were outside the building when the blast went off, but you didn’t go in.”
I nodded, having a hard time finding my voice.
He cupped my face, dragging my gaze to his. “Billie, I need you to say you hear me. That meansno one.”
“I hear you.” I sat back, crossing my arms, trying to pull myself together. The way Kaden was staring at me so intently wasn’t helping.
“No one,” he said. “This isn’t something that we can risk being overheard. You can’t be immune to Chaos and live in Nowhere.”
“What do you mean immune?”
“No one survives Chaos twice, not like this. It carved out the space around you but left you virtually untouched. It’s not natural.” He got to his feet, leaned an arm on the mantel, and looked out the window, appearing as jarred as I was.
“If word got out”—he shook his head—“you would be hunted down and killed by every creature who lives and breathes. Being immune to Chaos means you are beyond the rules of what balances everything in the universe. It makes you a threat to not only Topside, but Nowhere and beyond.” He turned and looked at me. “Do you understand? Because you need to.”
I picked up the glass and drained the last few drops.
He walked back over to refill the glass, but didn’t ask if I understood again. He might’ve guessed speaking was now beyond me for the moment.
This was all so outlandish that it was hard to believe. My whole life at this point was hard to believe. Not only was I a freak, but I was the biggest freak in a world of oddities?
“If what you’re saying is true, then you should want to…” I stopped talking. I wasn’t sure why I’d even said that in the first place. My life felt like it was dangling by a single thread.
It didn’t matter. I could tell he’d filled in the blanks.
“I’m not so set in my dogma to believe everything outside of the realm of normal is bad,” he said. “Some things can even be useful.”
So that was it. He was going to use me somehow, but I still didn’t know what for. As long as I was useful to him, though, he’d keep me alive, and that was all I needed right now.
